Contact: Long Lat

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There’s a scene in the movie Contact when Dr. Ellie Arroway walks onto the plane owned by eccentric billionaire S.R. Hadden – it’s their first and only physical interaction, and the one where Hadden reveals the primer to Arroway for decoding the messages being received from space. And when she walks onto the plane there’s a cut of her being captured on CCTV, adjacent to a monitor appearing to display the current location of the plane:

If you zoom around in Google Maps you’ll find the latitude and longitude coordinates approximately here, just north of a town called Yangjiapocun 杨家坡村 in the northern state of Shanxi, China.

But then I thought, well, maybe they intentionally reversed the numbers for the sake of disguising some other place. Not exactly, but these coordinates in Utah do seem a much more probably location for a secret meeting airstrip.

Neither appear to be true to any real-world location, but both are interesting, and another nugget of data hidden inside a still-great movie.